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When Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, the site of what would one day be the Holy Sepulchre Church was an abandoned stone quarry. A catacomb cut into the western side of the quarry attests that the quarry had fallen into disuse. The innermost chamber of the catacomb contains kokhim tombs. These deep recesses into the rock, typical of the first centuries B.C. and A.D., can still be seen behind the Syrian Chapel in the Holy Sepulchre Church today.

034 Jerusalem—Holy City for Jews, Christians and Muslims—exists in time, in space and in imagination. Early maps of the city, which often combine these elements in ways that the modern eye finds disconcerting, can teach us much about the city—...

029 History, it is said, is written by the winners. Perhaps that’s why we know so little about James, the brother of Jesus. Although he was a major player in the first-century A.D., his popularity waned in the next few centuries as the followers...

059 If I had a little sister, Rachel with sparkling eyes, wooed for seven years and loved by him, I’d swathe myself in her mantle, enwrap myself in her night. … One single night! Rachel, to taste his tender touch till day unmasks. One single...

027 The idea of a holy land has its beginnings in ancient Israel and in the Hebrew Bible. Biblical history begins with the call of Abraham to leave his people and his land in Ur of the Chaldees (Iraq) to serve the one God in a new land, the land...

025 In the days of Constantine the Great, the cross on which Jesus died was “rediscovered” in Jerusalem. Tradition gives Constantine’s mother, Helena, full credit for the find. Today, visitors to Jerusalem are shown the very spot, in a cistern...

028 In the deft hands of Jerusalem artist Yehudit Shadur, simple sheets of paper are cut into intricate designs blending the poetic words and images of the Bible. A leading reviver of the traditional Jewish folk art of paper-cutting, Shadur...

027 Did the gospel writers whitewash the role of Pontius Pilate on Good Friday, portraying him as a magistrate who condemned Jesus only under pressure from a Jewish prosecution, when in fact Pilate really wanted Jesus on the cross? This...

034 Controversy over the burial of James, the brother of Jesus, is nothing new. As early as the fourth century A.D., the location of James’s tomb was disputed. In the words of the church father Jerome, writing in 392 A.D.: “Some monks think James...

020 For the last two hundred years, a central question in biblical studies has been the authorship of the Torah (or Pentateuch). The Age of Enlightenment led scholars to realize that the traditional Jewish and Christian belief in Moses’...

020 Teaching at the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus amazes his fellow congregants. “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary?” his astonished listeners ask. “And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And...

028 Forty-seven years after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 B.C.E. and deported many of the people to exile in Babylon, Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, who had conquered the Babylonians and ruled most of the then-known...

031 Psst. There’s something you should know about Christmas. The Christmas carols, we’re afraid, might have it wrong: Jesus, many New Testament scholars believe, was not born in Bethlehem but Nazareth. Among scholars this view is no secret. But...

014 Huldah the prophetess—let us celebrate her—holds a unique place in history. It was she who, for the first time, designated a written document as Holy Scripture. She began the process that culminated more than millennium later in the...